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Sylvie Testud has long been confined to a wheelchair by multiple sclerosis. Having visited Lourdes several times before, she returns to a clinic run by the Order of Malta as much for a vacation as in any expectation of a miracle. Thus, she endures the endless religious ceremonial and her immersion in the healing waters with the same good grace she does the ministrations of officious nurse Elina Löwensohn. Testud would like to bond with carer Léa Seydoux, but she views being an angel of mercy as strictly a paying job rather than a vocation and prefers to spend her spare time socialising with the other volunteers and flirting with charity worker Bruno Todeschini.

However, just as Testud is about to resign herself to palling up with devout roommate Gilette Barbier, she is unexpectedly cured. Initially perplexed by her new-found health and celebrity, Testud struggles to acclimatise to her unaccustomed freedom. But then she decides to act upon her unspoken crush on Todeschini.

Examining the physical and psychological nature of the miraculous, whilst also challenging the morality of the Marian shrine and its sometimes dubious ancillaries, this is as much a black comedy as a reverential treatise on belief. But, with Martin Gschlacht's camera observing scenes of genuine piety and hope with the same dispassion it records the neon-lit haloes of the statues and the shelves stuffed with tacky furbelows, Hausner is always sufficiently evasive to keep you guessing at her precise motives. But whether she's being sincere or subversive, she still raises some disconcerting social and theological questions that only seem to confirm the contradictions at the core of Catholicsm and the world's other major creeds.

Russian Orthodoxy comes under scrutiny in Pavel Lungin's The Island, a lowering 2006 treatise on humanity's place in the universe and its troubled relationship with God. Aiming for Tarkovskyian significance, but falling as far short as Andrei Zvyagintsev's The Return (2003) and The Banishment (2007), this was deemed something of a curio its native Russia because ageing rocker Pyotr Mamonov was cast as a monk enduring hermitic torment to atone for past sins. But, with his weathered visage and uncompromising piety, he manages to invest this anti-Rasputin with a world-weary fury that's sly tempered by some bleak humour.

Opening with a monochrome wartime prologue, the action shifts to a remote Russian Orthodox monastery in 1976, where Mamonov has been punishing himself for the death of the captain he was ordered to shoot by a sadistic Nazi when he was just a young stoker on a barge transporting POWs. As if preparing himself for the Inferno, the soot-encrusted Mamonov devotes himself to maintaining the community's coal-fired boiler and singing at the top of his voice from the bell tower. Living alone in an adjoining cabin, he has little time for worldly father superior Viktor Sukhorukov and his sneering assistant, Dmitry Dyuzhev, who is determined to make the maverick conform to the order's rules and stop playing the pranks that consistently expose the foibles of his intimidated companions.

However, Mamonov's reputation as a healer amongst the locals had rendered him almost untouchable, even though he invariably demands a high price for his prayers and prognostications. He bellows at Iana Esipovich when she requests advice about an abortion and predicts her wickedness will prevent her from ever marrying. Then, when Nina Usatova asks about the husband who went missing three decades earlier, he blithely informs her that he's flourishing in France and urges her to leave immediately. But when Admiral Yuri Kuznetzov visits the island seeking help for ailing daughter Viktoria Isakova, Mamonov makes a discovery that finally paves the way for his redemption.

Superbly photographed by Andrey Zhegalov to contrast the forbidding White Sea landscape with Mamonov's craggy persona, this is a compelling study of the clash between individual faith and institutionalised religion. Moreover, it also serves as a knowing parable on the abuse of power and authority in both the Soviet era and the democratic present.

Director Michael Whyte has a less ambitious agenda in No Greater Love, a humbling and quietly inspirational study of the Carmelite sisters living in the Monastery of the Most Holy Trinity that was founded in Notting Hill in 1878. Although there are tantalising brushes with modernity - power tools for the garden, machinery for making communion hosts, a stereo for playing ceilidh music and a computer for shopping online with Sainsbury's - this is an order whose rule has changed little since it was established on Mount Carmel around 1210 and was converted into a Discalced community by saints John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila in the late 16th century. Consequently, the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience still pertain, as does an adherence to silence that is broken only during chapel services and two daily periods of recreation.

Philip Gröning created the template for the cloister documentary with Into Great Silence (2005) and Whyte, who spent a decade preparing the project, similarly operates as his own cinematographer and editor. However, he was also granted access to Prioress, Sister Mary of St Philip, as well as Sisters Mary Christine of the Trinity, Mary of St Joseph and Patricia Mary of Jesus, and their insights into a life of seclusion, contemplation and intercession are both courageous and compelling. The revelations about self-discovery, doubt and divine consolation are laudably frank and deeply moving. Yet they are also completely human and there is a genuine compassion and humility about their willing vocation to pray on behalf of those too preoccupied with worldly things to find time for God.

Although he discreetly captures sequences in the garden, the laundry and the common room, Whyte lingers longest in the chapel. With light often streaming through the windows and the sound of singing filling the air, the footage of the prayers that structure the daily routine and the services of Holy Week, as well as the funeral of a long-ailing nun and a novice's final vows, have a timeless beauty and intensity that will inspirit the devout and intrigue the disbelieving, as the music and grace that the sisters insist exists within the silence is often profoundly palpable.

In stark contrast to such entrancing simplicity, Belgian film-maker and media artist Johan Grimonprez and British novelist Tom McCarthy have produced a dazzling collage to celebrate the enduring genius of Alfred Hitchcock. Brilliantly edited by Dieter Diependaele and Tyler Hubby, Double Take is a mischievous treatise on both Hitchcock and the Cold War world in which he worked between 1957 and 1964. Against the backdrop of the Kitchen Debate between Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and US Vice-President Richard Nixon at an American trade fair in Moscow, the opening segment introduces us to Ron Burrage and Mark Perry, Hitchcock look- and sound-alikes, who offer teasing insights into the director's fascination with other selves. It also contains choice quips from the introductions that Hitch recorded for his TV series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, as well as advert excerpts for Folger's Coffee, which sponsored the show.

Even more intriguingly, Perry voices McCarthy's reworking of a Jorge Luis Borges short story that has Hitchcock encountering his older doppelgänger in an office on the Universal lot during the shooting of The Birds. Perry's impersonation of Hitch's Leytonstone drawl isn't that great. But he imparts to the tale a sense of self-doubt that is entirely absent from the director's screen persona and this reinforces the mood of uncertainty that existed as the 60s superpowers went head to head on nuclear proliferation, space exploration and geopolitical brinksmanship.

Anyone doubting how close the world came to calamity 50 yeas ago only has to watch the newsreel footage of the Bay of Pigs debacle, the erection of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, Grimonprez and McCarthy are less concerned with the events themselves as how the American networks reported them and did their bit to stoke up the national mood of paranoia. They are also interested in how Hitchcock responded to his momentous times, in films like Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963) and Topaz (1969), although they occasionally play a little fast and loose with chronology to make the pieces fit.

Indeed, this often feels more like a masterclass in research and assemblage than a cogent dissertation on history and myth. But, with Christian Halten's Bernard Herrmann-like score considerably enhancing the teasing efficacy of the pastiche, this is a worthy follow-up to Grimonprez's 1998 Don De Lillo-inspired study of plane hijacking, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. Moreover, it is also an affectionate homage to a portly auteur, whose endlessly entertaining thrillers belied the meticulous craftsmanship that went into their production and provided a deceptively acute analysis of the times in which they were made.

The construction process is further examined in Juan Carlos Rulfo's In the Pit (2006), which accompanies the members of a road gang as they work on the 10.5 mile second deck of the Periférico freeway that was designed to relieve the gnarled gridlock in Mexico City. Filmed between March 2003 and December 2005, the action centres on Chavelo and El Grande, chalk-and-cheese workmates whom Rulfo feels epitomise the polar attitudes held by most Mexicans about themselves and their homeland. But while phlegmatic crane operator Chavelo shrugs and accepts whatever life hurls at him, misanthropic stonemason El Grande plays up to the camera to declare that corruption is essential for success in this increasingly venal country, while the honest and decent get nothing but beans and eggs.

Little attention is paid to the softly spoken cable guy El Guapo, the daydreaming Natividad, the brusquely genial Pedro, the buoyantly musical Tomás, handsome ironworker Vicencio or the cocky, wife-beating José. Indeed, we learn more about night guard Sofia, who believes that the tarmac is possessed by the spirits of those who perished during the flyover's construction. But this is a sensitive study of the dignity of labour. Supported by Samuel Larson's dense sound mix, Rulfo's camera expertly captures the ardour and squalor of the enterprise, particularly when the men are forced deep into pits whose hellish connotations are readily evident. The brief visits to some of the gang's lodgings are also poignant. But the standout sequence is the final, six-minute chopper shot that glides along the length of the auto-route to the pulsating accompaniment of Leo Heiblum's score.

The camera acts as both conscience and accuser in Lucrecia Martel's intense study of class callousness, The Headless Woman. Yet no matter how close the much-lauded Argentinian director allows Bárbara Álvarez's relentlessly intrusive lens, middle-aged dentist María Onetto refuses to let a flicker of concern, let alone guilt or remorse, cross her impassive features. Indeed, even after she admits to husband César Bordón that she thinks she ran over a shanty kid while reaching for her phone on a remote winding road outside the north-western town of Salta, she is able to sleepwalk through her crisis, while he and Daniel Genoud cover her tracks.

What Onetto fails to tell Bordón during her confession in the middle of a supermarket is that she was hurrying to a sordid motel tryst with Genoud, who is married to her sister Claudia Cantero and whose teenage daughter, Inés Efron, idolises her aunt in a singularly flirtatious manner. She tries to hide her anxiety by concentrating on a landscape gardening project. But the delivery of some plant pots only brings her crime closer to home, as the order was delayed by the unexplained disappearance of the potter's young assistant.

With a delusional aunt's references to ever-present ghosts evoking the cheapness of life under the military junta, this is as much a socio-political allegory as a moral thriller. But it's also a stringently controlled Antonionian exercise in bourgeois alienation that's strewn with disconcerting cuts and temporal ellipses, as well as furtive references to Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel and co-producer Pedro Almodóvar. Onetto is a study in existential angst, who seems lost in a life she no longer recognises. But while Martel and editor Miguel Schverdfinger brilliantly obfuscate proceedings, this is never as sharp a critique of family ennui as Martel managed in either La Ciénaga (2001) or La Niña Santa (2004).

Coming to terms with death is also the key theme of Mia Hansen Løve's The Father of My Children. Inspired by the tragedy of French producer Humbert Balsan, this is also one of the most affecting screen attempts to tackle the ramifications of the credit crunch.

Charismatic workaholic Louis-Do de Lencquesaing has always been good at sheltering Italian wife Chiara Caselli from the pressures of his all-consuming passion for cinema. But the strain of convincing himself, as well as the misunderstood auteurs and trusting creditors bound up with his Moon Films company, that everything is fine eventually proves too much and he commits suicide.

Even though she had been feeling increasingly frustrated by her husband's inability to combine his professional and personal lives, Caselli vows to preserve both his cinematic legacy and his paternal significance to their three daughters. However, she finds an unexpected ally in taciturn teenager Alice de Lencquesaing, who draws inspiration from her father's films to sustain sisters Alice Gautier and Manelle Driss, as facts emerge about a past marriage and an unsuspected half-brother.

Revisiting ideas about father-daughter relationships that she'd explored in her debut feature, All Is Forgiven (2007), and clearly ruminating upon her own concerns for the future of independent film-making, Hansen-Løve maintains focus on the anguish of bereavement, while also celebrating the indomitability of children. Louis-Do de Lencquesaing exudes shabby affability and the torment he feels at failing everyone who depends upon him is adroitly handled. His real-life daughter also impresses, as she conquers confusion and despair and forges an attachment to aspiring director Dominique Frot.

Authentic in its depiction of both the filmic and domestic milieux, this is delicate and incisive, touching and trenchant. If the action becomes a touch melodramatic in the second half, it's sufficiently imbued with insight and intelligence to attribute such vicissitudes to life and not narrative contrivance.

Drug dealer movies employ a rigid set of stereotypes and clichés. But writer Özgür Yildirim gives a sting of authenticity to his debut feature, Chiko, by establishing a credible social milieu in Hamburg's rundown Dulsberg district before pitching Turkish immigrant Denis Moschitto and best buddy Volkan Özcan into a predictable hell on encountering record producer-cum-mobster Moritz Bleibtreu. The pair's relationship with Özcan's ailing mother, Lilay Huser, is particularly well observed. But generic convention all-too-quickly takes precedent after Bleibtreu teaches Özcan a painful lesson for disobeying orders pilfering hash and Moschitto becomes dazzled by both the trappings of coke peddling and the charms of sassy hooker, Reyhan Sahin. Indeed, he seems more committed to his vow to rescue from her psychopathic pimp.

The abrupt brutality of the violence is chilling, while the religious symbolism is shrewdly insinuated to show the role that Islam plays in the anti-heroes's daily lives. But even with renowned director Fatih Akin acting as co-producer, Yildirim loses sight of the everyday, as melodrama is allowed to supplant realism and potentially intriguing subplots like Moschitto's relationship with his young daughter and Fahri Ogün Yardim's fear of alienating his traditionalist father by throwing in his lot with his wild pals are regrettably neglected. Moreover, Bleibtreu is permitted to lapse into pantomimic caricature, while the soundtrack is thuddingly insistent.

Yet while this is always more persuasive as a socio-political tract than as a crime thriller, the climactic showdown between Moschitto and Özcan in the mosque toilets is genuinely distressing - if only because it forces the viewer to confront the plight of similarly marginalised immigrant twentysomethings across Europe.

By contrast, Pascal-Alex Vincent fails to retain control over his first feature, Give Me Your Hand. Borrowing heavily from Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), the action follows identical twins Alexandre and Victor Carril, as they trek from their father's village bakery in France to northern Spain to attend the funeral of their mother they never knew. They're a taciturn pair. Consequently, not much is said until they meet others on the road and these encounters invariably heighten the simmering tension between siblings who are by no means secure in their sexuality.

When not jostling or seeking to win smouldering contests, the brothers test each other's loyalty by flirting with strangers. The more outgoing Victor enrages Alexandre by sleeping with perky Anaïs Demoustier, just as he is developing a crush on her. But, shortly after taking a fraternal pounding for his indiscretion, Victor begins cavorting with Samir Harrag, after the pair stop off on a farm to earn a few euros baling hay. Again determined to wreak his revenge, Alexandre pimps his brother, who promptly disappears, forcing the fearful Alexandre to stride photogenically through the woods in a desperate search for him.

Opening with a passage of silent anime, this is never anything less than visually striking. Alexis Kavyrchine's rustic vistas often have a painterly feel, while Vincent makes adroit use of the sculpted and of the 18 year-old Carrils. However, neither is capable of much more than striking poses and their limitations are particularly exposed when interacting with such capable performers as Demoustier and Katrin Sass, whom they meet on a train. Vincent also seems more interested in shots of rippling torsos, misty woodlands and moon-dappled rivers than the suppressed emotions that underpin the twins' rivalry. Consequently, where this odyssey is concerned, the emphasis is always more on the homoerotic than the homeric.

Completing the celestial trilogy started with A Thousand Clouds of Peace Fence the Sky (2003) and Broken Sky (2006), Julián Hernández's Raging Sun, Raging Sky is even more uncompromising in imposing its own cadences while adopting an unabashed attitude to male beauty. However, running at over three hours, this winner of the Berlin Film Festival's Teddy Award for Best Feature is very much an acquired taste and those unused to Hernández's languid style may find it as frustrating as it's sumptuous.

What little plot there is opens in Mexico City, with Clarisa Rendon wandering through the hostile streets in search of a compassionate soul. She meets Guillermo Villegas, as a storm erupts over the sprawling metropolis, and they repair to his lodging for despairing sex. However, Villegas is more at home in the seedy cinema, where the lust of the patrons has caused the paint to peel off the walls. Villegas is keen to couple with the hunkily sensitive Jorge Becerra, but he is also coveted by the brutish Javier Olivan. However, their passion is not to be played out in a monochrome movie-house, but in a colour-kissed fantasy land, as Heart of the Sky Giovanna Zacarias guides Villegas through a stylised variation on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Echoes of Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet, Derek Jarman and Apichatpong Weerasethakul reverberate around this epic study of isolation, desire, physicality, sacrifice and death. There is also more than a hint of Tsai Ming-liang and Brillante Mendoza in the cinema sequence. But Hernández has the ability to personalise such hommages and this confirms him as one of Mexico's most distinctive directors. He's heavily reliant here on Alejandro Cantu's exquisite photography and the dense sound design of Armando Narvaez del Valle, but the pacing and choreographing of the action are pure Hernández. The bestial cinema grapplings won't be too everyone's taste, while the reverie often comes close to self-indulgence. But it's hard not to be mesmerised by the imagery or moved by the piteousness of these disconsolate souls.